Cloning a drive comes in handy for a variety of reasons, but primarily when you want to replace one drive on a PC with another that is either bigger or faster than the original drive, if not both.

Such a cloning operation becomes critical on Windows PCs when the drive to be replaced is the boot/system drive, meaning it contains the files used to boot up the machine when it's starting up or restarting, as well the operating system files used to run Windows itself. It’s critical because its proper outcome is a machine that boots and runs when that operation is complete, the old drive removed, and the new drive put in its place.

About disk cloning

By definition, disk cloning means creating a true and faithful copy of one computer storage device onto another. The name comes from a time when this meant a spinning hard disk of some kind. But today, with solid-state disks (SSDs) as common as hard disks (HDs), this can mean copying the contents of one storage device onto another storage device, where both source and target can be either an HD or an SSD. In fact, it's still often the case that the source is an HD and the target an SSD when a boot/system disk is the focus for cloning, because of the improved performance that such a changeover invariably delivers.